Pandemic Binge Watching Fear the Walking Dead

At some point I am going to have to stop pretending we’re binge watching this much television just because of the pandemic.  We do tend to do this in fair times as well, it is just somewhat more pronounced now due to not being able to go out to dinner or a movie or leave the house without a mask on.  Now that we’re fully vaccinated and the mask thing might be going away, we’ll just be binge watching.

But when it came to Fear the Walking Dead, we were still in pandemic stay-at-home mode, so it counts.

West Coast Walking Dead

After having watched ten seasons of The Walking Dead, you might have thought we were ready for something else.  Alas, no.  The lure of a different telling, a west coast suburban telling of the tale of the zombie apocalypse, seemed like a good idea.

And, I will admit, the first season was very strong.  Or, at least it delivered on the promise of a different and somewhat more relatable telling of the story.

The Walking Dead opens up with the main character waking from a coma to find the zombie apocalypse already in full swing.  Then, save for some time spent in Atlanta and looting the Smithsonian in Washington DC, it spends most of its time in rural settings.  At best you get small town zombie America.

Fear the Walking Dead opens up in a suburb of LA, which looks much like most suburbs in the coastal population areas, including my own, before the rise of the zombies occurs.  Or just as it begins.

And the story, which follows a family, one partner’s ex-wife, their kids, plays out how I imagine the zombie apocalypse would.  Everybody’s daily life and problems has their focus as hints of their impending doom start to show up.  There is a news report about a police shooting, a Vine video about some shambling homeless, the elderly neighbor growling through the fence.  Since you know what is coming… right, the title isn’t hiding anything… you want to yell at them to pack up and run for the hills.  But you also know how it goes in the suburbs.  Everything is fine and normal until suddenly it isn’t.

Things start getting out of hand, neighbors start holing up in their homes, and then the national guard shows up to help maintain control.

The family, including the ex-wife and a couple and their daughter who were picked up along the way as the panic started, are in a “safe zone,” fenced in and guarded by the military.  Others outside of the are evacuated and the national guard has orders to shoot any infected outside the safe perimeters… and they shoot first and skip asking any questions.

Anybody sick in the safe zone… because the zombie fever is already a thing… gets shipped off to a secure hospital for observation.  The family gets split up that way and it turns out that the Salvadorian barber, who the family is helping, turns out to be a former member of the Sombra Negra death squad and, when he feels that the guard isn’t telling them things they should know, captures a guardsman and tortures him into revealing the reality of the situation.

But things are ready to fall apart anyway.  The guard pulls back or deserts and the family goes to the secure hospital to rescue their family members.  There the oldest son has been befriended by Victor Strand, a confident man with a plan.  He leads them off to a boat and then to Mexico.

Because if you’re white suburban Californians who can barely speak menu Spanish and are ignorant of the culture, why wouldn’t you run to the country next door with a worse gun violence problem than your own?

There the tale becomes more akin to the original series.  You get armed gangs, people denying the apocalypse, people who think the zombies are still the people they were before, looting, shooting, and people generally becoming a worse problem than the zombies.

Still, that goes somewhat well, story wise.  They spend a season in Mexico, then get caught at the border by an armed group as they try to get back into what was the US, end up in a land dispute with Native Americans in New Mexico and eventually blow up a dam in the season three finale that is yet another testament as to why we cannot have nice things.

Then season four hits.  Despite good ratings and reviews, they decided to shake the show up.  The timeline was sped ahead to bring it into sync with the original series.  Both timelines started in 2010 in the shows, but the TWD launched five years ahead of FTWD.  They spend season four cleaning house, killing off much of the old cast and introducing a bunch of new characters, including a cross over character from the original show because… reasons.

Oh, and the show moved the setting to Texas with the fast forward and, like many Californians drawn to Texas, they find that the benefits (lower taxes, cheaper land) comes with many of the same old problems (traffic and/or zombies) with a few new twists (toll roads, hurricanes, ice storms, and heavily armed neighbors with strange beliefs).

And it all felt very much like a purge, like  they were sick of the old story line and the original family from episode one.  And yes, even in TWD they have killed off most of the early cast, including disappearing the episode one protagonist, but this felt different, even if the first person they injected into the new series was from episode one of the old. (Yeah, they couldn’t stop at just one.)

The stories get less compelling, more erratic and nonsensical, and you know that every time anything seem to going well somebody is going to show up and ruin everything.  Oh, and zombies.  They become a plot device more than a threat, though props to the one group who hooked several up to a capstan and created a perpetual motion machine used to pump oil.

As we got towards the end of season five I was suggesting loudly that we could maybe pick up with the new season of The Handmaid’s Tale or one of the movies on my watch list.  My wife can attest that on at least three occasions I swore that if the show did what I thought they were going to do I would turn it off and never watch it again.  Of course, they did the dumb thing I expected every time.  But we still rode it out to the end of the season.

By the end though I was convinced you could play a game RimWorld, note down the events, and write a better show script than what we were getting from seasons four and five. (Of course, I write that and wonder if there is a RimWorld mod for a zombie apocalypse scenario.  That would be some fun base building.)

Overall I enjoyed season one, largely due to being able to see the zombie apocalypse unfold in familiar territory.  Seasons two and three were fine, if headed down a predictable path.  I was surprised how quickly they got on board with “slather yourself with zombie guts and you’re safe to walk around.”  Then seasons four and five sucked the life out of the show by being both dumb and predictable.

I have heard that season six gets better… but I also saw somebody on Twitter declare they were done with the show due to events in that season.  I am fine giving season six a pass, but my wife seemed disappointed when I refused to subscribe to AMC’s streaming service in order to carry on.  I might be alone in my opinions in our house.

Anyway, the first five seasons are available on Hulu.

Was Cataclysm a Required Prerequisite for WoW Classic?

We got the date this week.  WoW Classic is coming on August 27th.

Classic is as Classic does

With that things felt… more real.  People started making plans.  I got an email from one of the old instance group, which we formed back in 2006 at just about the same patch level that WoW Classic is planned to launch with, indicating that we may yet again get the band back together.

I also started thinking about what class I might play.  Do I want to go back again as a pally with an offensive spell that is only good against demons or undead, along with auras and judgements and five minute buffs?

And do I go straight for consecrate on the holy tree?

You too can play with the talent calculator again.

I know Earl will go warrior and Skronk with a priest.  Maybe a druid this time, so I can do the run across the wetlands just like back in the day?

More on that as it develops.

And, of course, with the date announcement there was an unleashing of negative responses, often in the J. Allen Brack vein that nobody really wants WoW Classic, that it will flop, or that even if it starts strong people will soon realize it sucks and walk away.

I would have thought the ongoing success of EverQuest retro servers would have answered this question.  They form a part of the ongoing viability of the 20 year old game.  I suppose you do have to believe that Blizzard will learn from that, which is always a dubious proposition.  But even if Blizz thrashes about and moves at its usual glacial pace it should be able to make a success of selling nostalgia.  It certainly has a larger installed base to work with than EQ, and they are already suggesting that The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King variations on these servers could be in the works if WoW Classic does well, though Mr. Brack does remain the doubter in chief on that.

All this also got me thinking again on the Cataclysm expansion.

A date that will live in infamy…

Oh Cataclysm.  If there were thirteen expansions, this one would cost 30 pieces of silver.

I have many negative thoughts about that expansion.  Even in hindsight, where I take in other factors, like having played WotLK straight through from launch until Cata launched may have worn me out on WoW or that I followed Cata development more closely than any other WoW expansion which left me few surprises, there are still a lot of sins there.

And not the least among those sins was the reworking of the old world.

I get that Blizz was trying to improve the flow through the game to the current expansion, facing the problem of levels both with that and by limiting the expansion to just five more.  It was a first, if not very effective, cut at the levels issue.

And I will admit that many of the redone zones are actually better.  They have coherent focus and quests that further the story rather than the sometimes random series of of unrelated tasks that seemed to make up much of the content.

But MMORPG players seem to be an oddly nostalgic lot.  In a game that you don’t pick up, play for a few weeks, or maybe months if it is a particularly excellent game, but play for years, the history matters.  This was part of my “no good expansions” theory of the world, that expansion bring change, even to areas that otherwise remain untouched, which in turn leads to people pining for how things used to be.

In EverQuest many of the original zones have sat untouched for years, looking little different than they did back at launch, and yet Project 1999 is a thing, trying to bring back an original, untainted version of the early game, while purists decry the Daybreak progression servers as they include post-launch changes to the game.  The purists are small in number however, and Daybreak’s nostalgia farming continues to do well.

So I wonder if Blizzard had dialed back their plans a decade back, decided not redo the world, perhaps opting just tune it up to allow flying, tacking on the starter zones for the two new races the same way they did with TBC, and then just focusing on the new zones and dungeons and raids, if we would even be talking about a launch date for something like WoW Classic today?

The strongest argument for WoW Classic is that you cannot simply go back to old zones and see places as they used to be.  There is no was to easily simulate the old days, the way things used to be back at launch, because Blizzard changed it all.  Some zones didn’t get hit too hard, but others were changed drastically.

Once I ran a raceway… now it is under water

In doing that, in removing the easy out option of telling people that the old game still exists if they want to visit places like the Mirage Raceway, did Blizzard set themselves up to eventually have to create something like WoW Classic?

I still feel like MMORPGs are new ground for Blizzard in some ways, even almost 15 years in.  SOE launched it first nostalgia driven progression server a dozen years back when Blizzard was still trying to come to grips with WoW, the game that took over the whole company.

It feels like WoW Classic is them finally discovering yet another facet of the genre that makes it different from their stand alone games of the past, where you released something, maybe did an expansion, released a few patches, then moved on to other things.

MMORPGs are long term commitments.

Spring Movie League – Player One Denied

With week eleven now in the past we are down to the final two weeks of our Spring Fantasy Movie League.

Week eleven saw the likely last of the reign of The Avengers as the summer blockbuster season looms.  After two weeks split into three days The Avengers consolidated into a single expensive pick.

Avengers           $580
Life of the Party  $225
Breaking In        $131
Overboard          $85
A Quiet Place      $50
I Feel Pretty      $33
Rampage            $26
Black Panther      $22
Tully              $21
RBG                $13
Blockers           $9
Truth or Dare      $9 
Super Troopers 2   $9
Bad Samaritan      $7
Ready Player One   $6

The Avengers still seemed to be the best anchor for the week.  Neither of the two new anchor priced titles on the scene, Life of the Party and Breaking In, seemed like they had the wherewithal to take on The Avengers and its likely $60+ million take.

Or so it seemed on Monday night, with the forecasts as they stood.  But then the week went on and people started getting more and more optimistic about Breaking In.  Originally slated in the low teens, by Thursday people were calling it closer to $18 million, with some of the more exuberant saying they wouldn’t be surprised if it passed both the $20 million mark and Life of the Party.

With its pricing, a low teens Breaking In wasn’t worth considering.  But at $18 million it was cheap enough that you could load up seven screens of it and it seemed very likely to get the best performance nod, giving it a $2 million boost per screen.

What seemed like a gamble on Monday turned into a stampede by lockout time on Friday as 440 of the top 500 cineplexes went with the lineup 7x Breaking In, 1x A Quiet Place.

I was on board with that, as were seven others in the Meta League.  It seemed to be a very good bet.

And then the weekend came and with both the Saturday and Sunday estimates had a different lineup as the perfect pick.  Both Pak and Vigo were probably feeling pretty good through the weekend as their pick of 1x The Avengers, 3x Breaking In, 4x Ready Player One was on top.

The Avengers were doing about as expected, Breaking In was up near some of the high estimates, but seemed to be good for only about $16.5 million, while Ready Player One popped up relative to its $6 pricing to loom as the best performer.  A film looking to only bring in about $850K suddenly had $2 million added to its value.

The estimates stayed there through the weekend and it wasn’t until Monday afternoon when final numbers started replacing studio estimates that the real winner began to emerge.

The Avengers rang in about as expected, Life of the Party didn’t get past the $20 million mark as was forecast, ending up at about $17.9 million, and Ready Player One managed to hold onto its best performer crown.  But Breaking In popped up almost a million dollars, finishing at $17.6 million, which was just enough to make the 7x Breaking In 1x A Quiet Place lineup the perfect pick for the week.

Spring Week Eleven – Perfect Pick

It does seem a bit odd that the winning lineup lacks the best performing picture.  I am sure it has happened before, but in checking back through this season and the previous three, I didn’t see a single occurrence.  Corr pointed out that Week 9 of the Spring 2017 season had such a case, so it seems on the order of a once a year thing maybe.

There was actually a bit of rage in the FML forums about this from somebody who didn’t seem to know what the phrases “group think” or “echo chamber seemed to actually mean.  They had the pick that got aced out in the end.  Such is life.

Another oddity for the week was the resurgence of A Wrinkle in Time, which showed up in 1,600 more theaters for week eleven for reasons that escape me.  FML missed it as well, so while it made 11th place in the box office it had nothing to do with us.  And then there was Isle of Dogs, which was in 14th place overall.  If the pricing lineup had had perfect information, Ready Player One, in 16th overall, and Bad Samaritan, in 18th place overall, shouldn’t have even made the cut for the week.

It feels like a week where there should have been a Best of the Rest option at the bottom.

So that left the Meta League scores for the week looking like this:

1. Dr Liore’s Evil House of Pancakes (M) – $134,867,391
2. Biyondios! Kabuki & Cinema (T) – $134,867,391
3. SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights (T) – $134,867,391
4. Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex (M) – $134,867,391
5. Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite (T) – $134,867,391
6. Wilhelm’s Broken Isles Bijou (T/M) – $134,867,391
7. Ben’s X-Wing Express (M) – $134,867,391
8. Goat Water Picture Palace (T) – $134,867,391
9. Aure’s Astonishingly Amateur Amphitheatre (M) – $127,217,432
10. Paks’ Pancakes & Pics (T) – $126,539,630
11. Vigo Grimborne’s Medieval Screening Complex (T) – $126,539,630
12. I HAS BAD TASTE (T) – $116,022,807
13. Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex (T) – $114,083,857
14. Bean Movie Burrito (T) – $113,930,162
15. JHW’s Cineplex (T) – $107,265,819
16. Skar’s Movies and Meat Pies (T) – $106,171,002
17. Kraut Screens (T) – $104,587,829
18. Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex (T) – $103,648,088
19. Joanie’s Joint (T) – $103,474,232
20. Logan’s Luxurious Thaumatrope (M) – $102,894,868
21. DumCheese’s Cineplex (T) – $100,244,909
22. Dan’s Decadent Decaplex (M) – $81,531,546

The Meta League Legend:

• TAGN Movie Obsession – players from it marked with a (T)
• MCats Multiplex – players from it marked with an (M)

The top eight were all the same pick, followed by Aure and the theory that I Feel Pretty would get a boost from mother’s day, an idea that got crushed in the end.  Still, at least that kept it from being nine with the same pick I guess.  Then the two who got robbed when the final numbers came out, but weren’t too far behind in the end, which gets us to the halfway point of the list.

Dan had the most unfortunate selection, betting heavy on Life of the Party, I Feel Pretty, and RBG.  No Avengers and no Breaking In make Homer something something, and Dan was the only one without either.

That left the overall lineup looking like this:

1. Ben’s X-Wing Express (M) – $1,277,151,284
2. Biyondios! Kabuki & Cinema (T) – $1,253,241,558
3. Corr’s Carefully Curated Cineplex (M) – $1,215,614,121
4. Po Huit’s Sweet Movie Suite (T) – $1,200,573,162
5. Dr Liore’s Evil House of Pancakes (M) – $1,194,268,834
6. Goat Water Picture Palace (T) – $1,179,218,312
7. Aure’s Astonishingly Amateur Amphitheatre (M) – $1,171,399,575
8. Wilhelm’s Broken Isles Bijou (T/M) – $1,170,388,468
9. Paks’ Pancakes & Pics (T) – $1,162,257,297
10. Dan’s Decadent Decaplex (M) – $1,138,672,100
11. Logan’s Luxurious Thaumatrope (M) – $1,129,640,443
12. SynCaine’s Dark Room of Delights (T) – $1,097,787,239
13. Vigo Grimborne’s Medieval Screening Complex (T) – $1,051,852,293
14. Kraut Screens (T) – $1,043,291,814
15. Joanie’s Joint (T) – $1,014,494,563
16. Darren’s Unwatched Cineplex (T) – $1,008,757,400
17. DumCheese’s Cineplex (T) – $1,002,097,397
18. I HAS BAD TASTE (T) – $990,856,573
19. Miniature Giant Space Hamsterplex (T) – $956,663,129
20. Skar’s Movies and Meat Pies (T) – $940,502,452
21. JHW’s Cineplex (T) – $932,324,490
22. Bean Movie Burrito (T) – $835,202,336

Now is the point in the season when I must again mention the seeming unassailable state of Ben’s lead.  Ben essentially has to stumble in the next two weeks.  But given his performance so far this season, with the perfect pick five weeks out of eleven so far, that seems a dim hope.

As for the rest of the list, when eight of us pick the same lineup, and most of those were in the top eight of the overall standings already, that doesn’t make for a lot of change.  Dan took the biggest hit, with a drop from sixth to tenth place.  A few other people changed a spot or two, but there was nothing like a shakeup.

The main competition seems to be for sixth spot overall, with four of us possibly in the running for that.

While leads us to week twelve, the penultimate week of the season and the options it provides:

Deadpool 2 FRI      $501
Deadpool 2 SAT      $452
Deadpool 2 SUN      $337
Avengers            $280
Show Dogs           $99
Book Club           $98
Life of the Party   $76 
Breaking In         $73
Overboard           $50
A Quiet Place       $45
Pope Francis        $25 
I Feel Pretty       $21 
Rampage             $19
Tully               $13
RBG                 $13

Deadpool 2 is the big dog this week, big enough to be split over three days.  In addition there is Book Club, which is literally about four women in their 60s reading Fifty Shades of Grey (Does them reading a bad book make for a bad movie?), Show Dogs, which is set in our world only dogs are sentient, and Pope Francis, which is, as you might expect, about Pope Francis.

With six slots being claimed by new films, there was a serious purge of the low end, with Blockers, Truth or Dare, Super Troopers 2, Bad Samaritan, Ready Player One, and Black Panther being dropped from the list.

Unless you have a serious counter programming inspiration here, it seems like some variation on Deadpool 2 is your anchor choice of the week, two screens preferred.  I have to imagine that The Avengers will tank all the more with another superhero flick hitting the box office.  It is just the usual decision about whether or not Friday is a mug’s game this time around.  For The Avengers FML was on the money for Friday, but underestimated Saturday and Sunday.  Will it go the other way this time around?

And then there are the changes to FML.

Go make your picks early just in case the new interface confuses you.  You now have the option to make different picks for each league you are in.  This will come into play next season when the special rules option shows up. (See Monday’s post about the options proposal.)  Once you see how to copy your picks from one league to the others it isn’t so bad, but if you want to keep all your picks in sync… and you change your mind a lot like I do… it can be annoying.

The new interface also means I can’t take the usual huge screen shot of my lineup.

The price of change.

So there we go, on to week twelve and Deadpool 2!

Pokemon Lycanroc event at GameStop

Pokemon Sun & Moon have been out for about six months now, and we’ve not heard anything yet about the next release, so Nintendo is still promoting what it has.  There is still a Pokemon in the Alola Pokedex unaccounted for, Marshadow, who does look like a cross between a marshmallow and a shadow.  But as they dangle that before us, Nintendo also has another give away.

Between May 15, 2017 and June 5, 2017 you can go to your local GameStop to pick up a card for a special Lyncanroc Pokemon in its night time, full moon, werewolf-esque form.

Available for a limited time

Supplies of the cards are limited, so head to GameStop sooner rather than later if you want this Pokemon.  The code is only valid for Pokemon Sun & Moon.

Of course, you can always just evolve a Rockruff into this form by leveling him up past level 25 at night, but the GameStop version comes with a special set of moves and a held item.

Meanwhile, Nintendo also has another download offer going on this month.  Following the instructions at this link will let you download mega stones so you can have mega evolutions in battle for Pidgeot, Steelix, Heracross, and Houndoom.

May 2017 Mega Stones

As with the above, this offer is only good for Pokemon Sun & Moon and must be collected before the end of the month.

I continue to potter around in Pokemon Sun at my end, working on a project I will likely post about at another time.

BB75 – Shooting in Stations

This month’s Blog Banter, number 75 in the series, asks the following:

What Does Project Nova Need to Be Successful?
At Fanfest CCP showcased their current iteration of the FPS set in the Eve Universe. Following on from DUST514 and Project Legion, Project Nova is shaping up to be a solid FPS with CCP taking the decision to get the game mechanics right first. However with so many FPS out there what will Nova need in order to stand out from a very large crowd and be successful? What are the opportunities and perhaps more importantly, the dangers for CCP? How can Nova compete against CoD, Battlefront and Titanfall to name a few?

And the topic of the month certainly hits the nail on the head.

EVE Online Universe Forever

CCP has certainly found success with spaceships.  EVE Online is an enduring money maker, having just turned 13, and while the jury is still out on EVE Valkyrie in the long term, it certainly happened to be the right title at the right moment for VR and so will likely pay off the investment in the title.  But those two, and the board game Hættuspil, are about the limit of success for CCP.  Certainly DUST 514 didn’t pass that bar.

But at least CCP has some experience in that area now.  And they corrected one of the DUST 514 problems already by putting Project Nova on Windows, where most of its fan base resides.   But Project Nova still faces huge competition.

A prophecy?

I think the last line in this month’s question undersells the market.

• Call of Duty franchise – new title every year
• Battlefield franchise – new titles or expansions a few times a year
• Team Fortress 2 – Valve’s enduring free to play lock on the genre
• Counter Strike: Global Offensive – For Valve fans who hate cartoon graphics
• Titanfall – in the science fiction genre
• Boarderlands franchise – Co-op FPS that you know isn’t done yet
• Retro FPS flavor of the month – Most recently, Doom and Wolfenstein
• All those other titles on Steam that are FPS in nature, which adds up to more than 300 possible competitors on Windows with Multiplayer as an option…

That last one is they key here.  According to Steam we’ve already had 30 titles released so far this year that match both “FPS” and “multiplayer” as keywords.  And while they are not all stars or even good or likely direct competitors, they are mucking up the market.

So many titles…

So we have a crowded market where the big players toss out a new, big budget, best selling titles at least once a year (along with a retro title now and again), and only a few titles endure and remain popular over time.  Given that, CCP has some options:

Play to your base – Give it an off-planet, space theme and put it in the EVE Online universe.  I only saw a bit of the footage from Fanfest, but it looked like fighting in stations or citadels was already on the list.  It felt a bit like Marathon updated to me.  Maybe give people a bit of the in-station experience that a small part of the player base craves.

Link with EVE Online – This is a bit more risky.  While a given, and something that would get EVE players interested, CCP should not make anything in one game depend on the other.  We were promised orbital bombardment with DUST 514, but I never ended up dropping rocks on anybody.  On the flip side, links with New Eden could make for a more enduring title, which I think might suit CCP better.  I do not think of them as a studio able to crank out a new title yearly.

VR perspective – CCP already has work invested in VR, so their claim to fame could be in bringing the first space themes FPS to market.  Granted, that would limit, rather than increase, their audience at this point, but it plays to a potential strength that CCP is trying to establish.

I am not sure that any of those would guarantee success even if Project Nova is good.  I am not convinced that being good is enough in a market where being the latest Call of Duty seems to be the key to financial success.  I think the best that CCP can shoot for is to be enduring, like EVE Online itself, to make something that has a solid and interesting base which can improve and evolve over time.  What that looks like though… I do not know.

Of course, my FPS days are long behind me.  I haven’t been any sort of good at the genre since the days of Desert Combat.  I don’t wish Project Nova anything but success, but I am not sure how you get there from here.

And just a couple blog banters ago the topic was what other games set in New Eden should CCP pursue, and my own entry was about as far from an FPS as one could get.

Anyway, that is my submission for Blog Banter 75.  Others answering the call:

• Voyager Spirit – What Does Project Nova Need to be Successful?
• Roc’s Ramblings – Project Nova